People do what they want or like to do

Employees want to create value, they want to move the company forward. Yet, without clear and concise understanding of what they need to do (and in what priority) most will typically do either what they want to do, or what they like to do. While this is fine, organizations often need people to do the more difficult tasks.

If you describe your job or one of your employees jobs as like drinking from a firehose (which seems like all roles these days) chances are you need to be very proactive in determining priorities.

Beyond the Checkbox - Part IV

Chris Tyler from Cognos will be joining us for a series of Blogs focused on driving performance for ISVs and OEMs. We will be publishing his Blogs on Thursdays for the next four weeks. Chris is a subject matter expert on getting his clients to elevate value to their customers.

This is the final part of this series. In Part III, we discussed the typical way vendors address their customers reporting needs, by simply checking the reporting box and delivering little or no value to their customers. Here will discuss a better way.

A Better Way - How to change the game

The customer should word their requirement “Do you have an analytical application which proves your application improves the performance of my organization as it relates to increasing our win rates by 7% year over year, reducing sales cycle times by 13%, and increasing our deal sizes by 5% year over year?” I’m sure the vendor would have a much tougher time checking that box, but, that is what the customer truly needs to know.

Figure 2 – An example of an analytic report which shows the business impact and provides context as to what it means to the business, what else to look for and what to do next.

Most enterprise purchases are fairly significant investments and the vendors are often very willing to present case studies where the return on investment, ROI, is achieved in, say, 14 months. Few vendors can actually prove it with their reporting solutions. If the vendor has gone through the process to measure the ROI and understand how it achieves the ROI, why not take that same thought process and put it into an Analytical Application that can be delivered? These types of analytical applications tend to increase customer satisfaction and stickiness, and become a significant, additional revenue stream.

What should the vendor be doing to deliver the value proof? How can the vendor go Beyond the Checkbox? Here are several ways. All of these should leverage and highlight the intellectual property and knowledge of the customer the vendor has.

Identify the value points

Identify 3-7 reasons why customers should buy your application. These become the value points which translate into metrics. These should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time-based).

Domain	Value Statements	SMART Metrics
CRM	Reduce sales cycle times Increase deal sizes Increase win rates Reduce cost of sales	Days to closure Average deal size growth Win/loss rates Cost of sales
Security	Reduce risk exposure Decrease intrusions Improve Data Governance and Compliance	# of threats identified/thwarted as it relates to system criticality and sensitivity % of critical systems adhering to corporate standards
Human Capital Management	Decrease attrition rates of high value employees Improve employee satisfaction Properly manage talent pool Increase successful recruiting rates	Attrition rates for top performers Employee satisfaction % of employees within 1-2 years of retirement Tenure / attrition rates of employees by recruiting source

Define the metrics

Build a business glossary to define the metric. This should contain what we refer to as the “What?, Why?, So What?, Now What?” This should be able to explain the intent of the metric. All metrics should relate somehow back to the value points identified earlier. If they don’t, there is typically no reason to track it.

Setting targets

The vendor should allow the customer to set targets for the various metrics and if applicable, any tolerances which may be acceptable. Comparing the actual values from the transactional data to the targets set by the customer, allows the user to see if they are on the right track to achieve their results.

Simplify taking action

There may be a need to share the content with another user, a user may want to comment on the performance, there may need to be some action plan set in motion to improve the performance, a user may want to subscribe to the content, or there may be a need to drill into the detail behind the metric.

Content should be in context

Content in context can imply that it is related to the logged in user or is specific to the current view within the vendor’s application. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this ranging from a tight API-level integration to a loosely-coupled web-based integration using URL’s, all depending on the capabilities of the vendor application.

About the author

Chris Tyler has been working for the past 4+ years with Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO’s) to help them address the specific needs of embedding BI into their platforms. He has seen some great successes and some dismal failures. Some commonalities with the successes are that the vendor delivering the application actually put some thought and intellectual property into their content. The failures typically did not.

Is a failed action the same as a failure to act?

Over the weekend, Seth Godin blogged about making timely decisions.  It brought to mind a number of items worth additional discussion.  One of my favorite sayings is "we should do something" when managers are shown a potential issue.  It is usually followed up with a flurry of meetings, too much information, and less than a clear path forward.  While frustrating, it became clear over time that we often lack a process to consider, debate, and ultimately put ad-hoc course corrrections into action.  It was also appearant that we suffer from a culture that uses information overload to decline action based on the need for additional information. 

To make a little more sense of it, here is a two by two grid that shows the risk and rewards of whether action was created and whether it was correct or not.  The goal of this was to highlight perhaps the personal motivations behind action or lack thereof.

Creating action is more likely to cause the extremes in risk versus reward, while delaying or taking no action is often the safer route.  While companies need to take risks to lead within the market, employees may not have the same motivations.  Is the potential for a promotion, worth the risk of falling out of favor?  Do we, as company policy, reward action financially?  Is a failed action the same as a failure to act?

Beyond the Checkbox - Part III

Chris Tyler from Cognos will be joining us for a series of Blogs focused on driving performance for ISVs and OEMs.  We will be publishing his Blogs on Thursdays for the next four weeks.  Chris is a subject matter expert on getting his clients to elevate value to their customers. 

This is Part III of this series.  In Part II we discussed the ways a vendor may choose to address the needs of their customer as it relates to reporting.  We will show here, the typical way vendors address that with a reporting solution.

Checking the reporting box

When the vendor provides these basic reporting capabilities, I call this “checking the reporting box”.  The vendor is delivering enough reporting functionality to allow them to check a box stating that they provide reporting as part of their application, a common requirement of any company evaluating an enterprise application.

Figure 1 – A common example of a report that allows a vendor to check the reporting box, but which provides little or no value proof.

Having the requirement of reporting included with an application is necessary, but it’s how the requirement checkbox is worded.  The checkbox is often phrased “Do you have reporting with your application?”  The vendor, providing even the most basic reporting capabilities, can then safely check the box, stating “Yes, we deliver reporting as part of our application”.  I don’t intend to imply that this is a negative.  Operationally, most of these reports are needed and verify that proper actions are being taken and the application is functioning properly.  The customer needs more!

There are four issues I find with reporting solutions from vendors who simply do enough to check the reporting box. 

• Their reporting typically does nothing to verify the claims that a vendor makes regarding its solution
• The vendor delivers no intellectual property or thought leadership to serve as a differentiator which leads to more wins and larger deals
• There is little or no charge to the customer for the additional capability and therefore the vendor looks at it as a cost center not as a revenue opportunity
• It does nothing to expand the user community of the vendor’s application within the customer

About the author

Chris Tyler has been working for the past 4+ years with Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO’s) to help them address the specific needs of embedding BI into their platforms.  He has seen some great successes and some dismal failures.  Some commonalities with the successes are that the vendor delivering the application actually put some thought and intellectual property into their content.  The failures typically did not.

Blue Ocean, Red Ocean...

If you have not read the book on Blue Ocean Strategy, I would highly recommend it.  No matter what industry you are in or how competitive your market is, it should make you think about innovation.  Most companies I have worked with find it difficult to integrate innovation into their management cycle, and therefore innovation is done in an ad hoc manner.  

While a Blue Ocean (Red Oceans are competitive markets where everyone has spilled blood) market play may not be for everyone, you can think of new ways to measure the business, process improvements, compensation plans, marketing tactics, etc if you create a more formal manner for innovation.

Additionally, you might find a great deal of value of reassessing the competitive landscape.  It never hurts to discuss how would a new competitor attack the market.  All great businesses find themselves under threat from unseen ideas - this may just give you a more proactive manner to see the ideas coming.  

Strategy Maps for Strategy Development

The Strategy Map is one of the more interesting tools in terms of Strategy Development.  I know most people want to describe it as a Strategy Execution tool, but I see it as a great check to the overall health of your strategy?

• Do you cover things other than the financial outcomes in terms of your strategic objectives?
• Do you consider the customer voice, or desire?
• Do you know where you are in your strategy lifecycle?

I know some people like to design complex strategy maps that take months and months to develop with strategic objectives to cover all contingencies.  The font becomes too small, and the word optimize shows up too much.  

What if we took a different tact?  What if we use the Strategy Map as a santiy tool, to test the strategies to make sure they are top of mind and easy to digest?  Instead of creating too many objectives, we focus on clairty of thought.  We use the tool to make sure the organization can understand what we are doing and to then use the map to define the initiatives and performance measures that align their department with the overall corporate goals?

Beyond the Checkbox - Part II

Chris Tyler from Cognos will be joining us for a series of Blogs focused on driving performance for ISVs and OEMs.  We will be publishing his Blogs on Thursdays for the next four weeks.  Chris is a subject matter expert on getting his clients to elevate value to their customers.  

In part I of this series, we discussed the relationship between vendor and customer and how there comes a point where the customer determines the need to have reports from the system.  In this part, we will look at the typical ways a vendor approaches the solution for those reporting needs.

Now what

One of two things will happen to address the reporting need. 

1. The customer is forced to build their own reports with 3^rd party tools
2. The vendor builds and delivers some reports as part of the application 
1. Building a home-grown reporting solution
2. Embed a 3^rd party reporting / BI / Performance Management solution

In the first case, the vendor has no control over what the customer is doing.  Because the customer has little understanding of the underlying data structures and relationships, there is a high likelihood that the customer could pull the information incorrectly or misinterpret the data.  This can lead to making bad decisions or incorrect assumptions.  As mentioned earlier, according to Gartner, this is the primary reason that enterprise reporting and data warehousing projects fail.

In the second case vendors will often rush to deliver a reporting solution and simply dump out easily accessible data into lists and charts.  I have seen too many reports such as Call Logs, Current Sales Orders, and Customers by Demographics delivered as the basis of a reporting and analytic solution. 

Building a home-grown, custom reporting solution can be very costly and will limit flexibility, scalability and capability.  Additionally, BI and Performance Management is outside the core competencies of the development staff and becomes a resource drain on development resources limiting core application innovation. 

To avoid the resource and cost problems, vendors can choose to embed a 3rd party reporting tool. These 3rd party applications generally provide additional capabilities to the vendor and allows development resources to focus on innovation within the core application.  However, vendors will limit the use of these 3rd party products to delivering basic reporting through interactive reports, fancy charts or even some ad hoc capabilities. 

About the author

Chris Tyler has been working for the past 4+ years with Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO’s) to help them address the specific needs of embedding BI into their platforms.  He has seen some great successes and some dismal failures.  Some commonalities with the successes are that the vendor delivering the application actually put some thought and intellectual property into their content.  The failures typically did not.

Because you can...doesn't mean you should

We do a number of things in the name of business intelligence.  We say we have to have real time information.  We have to have hundreds of reports.  We have to be able to look at everything in every direction.

Business Intelligence software promises us this and make this seem like an achievable goal.  And yes it would be great to know everything about everything and get a perfect 360 degree view of the organization.

Yet it is not really achievable, actually not even close.  Instead ask what are the goals & objectives of the organization, and how does this support that end.  We are very quick to say "we can do that" but we need to temper that with "why should we do that?"  Think of the goal of a dashboard - to provide real-time information on a specific subject.  I have known many managers that constantly stare at the screen to see if anything moved.  

What we really need is to understand how to use the function of time and integrate that into a analytical management process.  What would you get more out of, a tactical dial that shows us one KPI, or a meeting at the end of the day to review a number of KPIs?

Beyond the Checkbox - Part I

Chris Tyler from Cognos will be joining us for a series of Blogs focused on driving performance for ISVs and OEMs.  We will be publishing his Blogs on Thursdays for the next four weeks.  Chris is a subject matter expert on getting his clients to elevate value to their customers.  

Who should read this?

This document is intended for software vendors (ISV’s) and business process outsourcers (BPO’s) wanting to increase deal size, win more deals and improve customer stickiness by embedding packaged, advanced analytical capabilities as part of their application. 

Why should you read this?

• The software and outsourcing industries are increasingly competitive businesses and vendors need to continue to innovate cheaper, faster and better than the competition
• Vendors need to provide thought leadership for their customers and demonstrate unmatched domain expertise
• ISV’s and BPO’s need to demonstrate rapid, quantifiable ROI
• According to a 2008 Gartner report, most enterprise reporting and data warehouse projects fail primarily due to the complexity of the data in business systems, vendors      can guide their customers through the complexity

The vendor customer relationship

Every vendor designs, markets and sells its application or services to solve specific problems for its customers.  Here are a few examples.

Domain	Value Statements
CRM	Reduce sales cycle times Increase deal sizes Increase win rates Reduce cost of sales
Security	Reduce risk exposure Decrease intrusions Improve Data Governance and Compliance
Human Capital Management	Decrease attrition rates of high value employees Improve employee satisfaction Properly manage talent pool Increase successful recruiting rates

Vendors are engaged by prospects to address their specific business pains.  Through the sales cycle, the prospect will generally evaluate multiple vendors for a match to their needs.  The vendor will demonstrate software capabilities and possibly prove out concepts that will provide the prospect with comfort that the vendor will meet their needs.  The prospect will select the vendor and the two parties will set off on a journey to start solving problems. 

Through the installation and implementation process, the solution is tailored for the customer, the users are trained on how to get maximum benefits, and the customer is taught how to maintain the application.  Once the solution is implemented, what happens?  The customer is happy with the solution; their users punch all the buttons and they just enjoy seeing the applications do stuff?  Sure, but the customer needs some sort of proof that the application is solving their problems.  They need reports!

About the author

Chris Tyler has been working for the past 4+ years with Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO’s) to help them address the specific needs of embedding BI into their platforms.  He has seen some great successes and some dismal failures.  Some commonalities with the successes are that the vendor delivering the application actually put some thought and intellectual property into their content.  The failures typically did not.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) & Key Risk Indicators (KRIs)

Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) are an interesting concept, or twist to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  Instead of thinking of KPI measuring performance, think of a KPI as really just an indicator that the objective is at risk.  They are really the same thing.

If your objective is to Maintain Salesforce Effectiveness, a solid indicator might be revenue per sales rep.  If our revenue per sales rep is declining, it should be treated as a trigger for a broader discussion on the objective, not necessarily the KPI.  At the same time, we will want to analyze a number of other performance indicators for a deeper, richer discussion.

When we look at KRIs for example employee turnover is this not just a performance measure against the objective Retain Great Employees?  

In the end though, we are just splitting hairs by calling something a KPI or KRI.  It matters far more that we have the discussion about the objective(s), than trying to build seperate processes to measure subtle nuiances.

The Continuous Improvement Meeting - CIM

Including on this blog, much has been written about meeting management: how to run a more effective meeting, improving meeting outcomes, etc. All concepts in which I am in complete support. I've found, however, that it is very difficult to implement wholesale change into an organization's meeting culture. And there are several characteristic profiles of meeting culture within organizations.

Meetings typically occur for the purpose of communicating information, yet most meetings I've witnessed over my career consistently end with no action or accountability to do something. So, what I'm going to suggest here is not a change in your existing meeting culture. Continue to hold the meetings that your organization routinely conducts, for whatever the purpose. But, if your organization is serious about driving operational performance improvement, you need to add a meeting to your schedule. Yes, that's right. I'm advocating yet another meeting. This meeting is specific in purpose. It never deviates its agenda. And it is a critical management tool for driving performance improvement.


The continuous improvement meeting or "CIM" has five objectives.


1. Review progress against KPIs
2. Identify barriers to performance
3. Share best practices
4. Develop action plans for next period
5. Recognize superior performance

The CIM is 45 minutes in length, maximum. It is conducted at every level of the organization. This is critical to insure all levels of the operation are aligning their efforts with the strategy. Typically, the meeting should occur weekly at the front line to monthly and/or quarterly at the executive level.


The keys to successful implementation of the CIM are:

• It is a separate, distinct meeting. Not part of another meeting agenda.
• 45 minutes maximum
• It is held at the same time & day every period
• It must be group meeting


One of the biggest gaps in operational performance management is the area of management effectiveness. We tend to focus on effectiveness and efficience of front line contributors. But how exactly does management improve its effectiveness at managing? Try implementing the Continuous Improvement Meeting into your management process and see how much more focus you create around the metrics that are important to your organization's strategy.